Second car bomb discovered in LondonExplosives-laden vehicles could have killed scores, authorities sayMSNBC and NBC NewsUpdated: 2:15 p.m. MT June 29, 2007British authorities were seeking three men Friday after police defused two car bombs that they said could have caused “significant injury or loss of life” in London.

The three men are believed to be from the Birmingham area, a center of radical Islamic unrest in Britain, U.S. officials who had been briefed on the developments told NBC News.

Police said the two cars, a light green and a light blue Mercedes-Benz, were found early Friday morning in London’s theater district. The green Mercedes was defused at the site. The blue Mercedes was not discovered to be a threat until early Friday evening, after it had been issued a parking ticket and towed to an impoundment lot near Hyde Park.

“These vehicles are clearly linked,” said Peter Clarke, chief of Britain’s antiterrorism police. “The discovery of a second bomb is obviously troubling.”

The car bombs were similar to highly destructive explosives used in Iraq and could have killed scores of people, U.S. and British officials told NBC News. British officials warned that the country was facing a “serious and sustained” terrorist threat.

The first car, which was parked under a blue awning near the popular Tiger Tiger nightclub, just 50 yards from Trafalgar Square, was jammed with gasoline and 18 to 20 boxes of roofing nails. Six to eight tanks of propane, intended to mix with the gasoline in a mist to make a fuel-air explosion, were inside and around the car, counterterrorism officials told NBC News.

Clarke told reporters that the second car was similarly laden with explosives and nails.

U.S. officials told NBC that the devices appeared designed to create a highly explosive bomb of the type that had been seen in Iraq but not, until now, in the West.

Islamist terrorist suspects convicted in recent London cases have spoken of moving up to more deadly fuel-air explosives, authorities said. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said earlier this year that “vehicle-borne weaponry is the greatest danger that we can face.”

Authorities fear more devicesThe two cars were left at the same place, but their discoveries were very dissimilar.

The first car was immediately recognized as a threat and disarmed at the scene. The second car, however, sat unrecognized for most of the day after it was hitched up to a tow truck and carted down London’s streets to a police impoundment lot.

The historic Fleet Street journalism district was also briefly shut as police examined a third suspicious vehicle before reopening the street.

Jacqui Smith, who was on her second day as Britain’s new home secretary, said the country was confronted with “the most serious and sustained threat to our security from international terrorism.”

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said U.S. officials had no evidence of a threat to U.S. security.

With the approach of Independence Day, however, New York officials said they were ramping up security in light of the developments in London, where a New York police official was coordinating with local authorities.

“Some of you will notice, some of you won’t — but we have to be cognizant,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show.

Highly dangerous devicesIt was clear that the devices, had they exploded, would have caused great damage and many casualties in the area, which is packed with restaurants, bars and theaters.

“This is a busy area that time of night,” the police official told NBC News. “There could have been a fireball that could have penetrated the club, and with the nails, it could have caused serious casualties.”

The attempted bombing comes just days after Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister and a week before the second anniversary of the July 7 London bombings that killed 52 people. Brown echoed Smith’s observation that Britain faced a serious terrorist threat.

“I will stress to the Cabinet that the vigilance must be maintained over the next few days,” Brown said.

Security at the Wimbledon tennis tournament was increased in response to the thwarted attack, The Associated Press reported.

“We are a high-profile event, and the championships take security very seriously,” Roger Draper, Lawn Tennis Association chief executive, told Radio Five Live.

By Alex Johnson of MSNBC.com and Stephanie Gosk of NBC News in London. NBC’s Robert Windrem in Washington and WNBC-TV’s Jonathan Dienst in New York contributed to this report.URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19495826/

Folks, I just spent three hours surfing the net and did I learn a lot! Did you know that most of the news we get is controlled by the Bu$hies? Let me enlighten you about today's so-called terrorist bombing attempt in London:

1. There is no proof that this was terrorism. With Blair gone, there IS no more terrorism in the UK. This was obviously just someone's car, probably belonging to a nail salesman, who kept a lot of samples in his car. He was on his way to a barbecue, of course, which explains the propane. And he needed the extra gas, too, because - hello! - he was driving a gas-guzzler (instead of a hybrid, which is really mean-spirited).

So in effect, this was some right-wing, global warming-enabling carpenter on his way to char little animals for his own gratification.

2. Are we not supposed to notice it's the first full day of Gordon Brown's administration? This is a very CONVENIENT time for George Bush to claim terrorism is continuing. Tony Blair, obviously knew about this in advance and in a cowardly fashion, and at the behest of his Bu$h Yankee overlords, left office this week.

3. Admirably, the alleged bombers chose England - so anyone injured would receive free health care. If a bomb would have gone off in, say, New York City, imagine all the performance artists and stand up comics who might have been injured. Surely, as Michael Moore would attest, they'd be turned away from the ER.

4. It's also good they chose a Mercedes instead of the subway. Bombing public transportation would have sent the wrong environmental message. Targeting a symbol of conspicuous consumption sends a chilling message to physicians everywhere.

5. The car was parked outside a bar called 'Tiger Tiger,' which highlights the near extinction of that species. That can't be a bad thing.

6. The fact that the bomb did not go off demonstrates the inequity in standards of science education for ethnic minorities.

7. Clearly these people responsible are angry at us and I am proposing a minute's silence and formation of steering committee for us all to consider what we as individuals can do to make these people less angry.

Many commentators have unburdened themselves of the observation that the British terrorists don’t seem very smart. Or technologically ept. They failed to blow themselves up in London, despite having lots of martyrdom gear. They failed to crash through barricades at Glasgow Airport, and you’d think they might have noticed the obstacles. Beloved Allahpundit remarks, in response to stories suggesting that the failed terrorists came from al Qaeda and received guidance from Iran, that “a joint AQ-Iran operation would have run a lot more smoothly and packed a considerably bigger wallop that these attacks did.”Did you really expect high-I.Q. martyrs? Maybe clever killers, but somebody should have pointed out — long since — that it isn’t very smart to blow yourself up. And for the most part, the martyrs haven’t come from the best-educated sectors of the population. But so many scribblers have been impressed by the deep faith of the suiciders, that they’ve shied away from this fairly obvious point. And one could go further. Indeed one should go further: All those parents and siblings who speak with reverence of their exploded child or brother or sister or cousin or uncle, they should be ashamed of themselves. Because they’re fools.

And their leaders, who play them for fools, know it and delight in that knowledge. No terrorist leader has ever blown himself up. No way, that’s not their job. Their job is to get other people to blow themselves up. The leader sends them to die, and pays off the family, having done whatever it takes to convince the martyr-to-be to go through with it. Which isn’t always so easy, by the way. There are abundant stories about martyrs taking drugs before and during the Great Day of the Virgin Orgy. There are slightly less-abundant stories about martyrs having been chained to their car bombs, and there are plenty of stories from Iraq — broadcast throughout the Middle East, but so far as I know not over here — about jihadis ordered to drive explosives-laden vehicles to point X, having been assured it’s perfectly safe, only to have the thing blow up before they leave. They were scheduled to have been martyred by their leaders — the smart guys — and their families back home in Saudi or Yemen or North Africa were told that they sacrificed themselves for The Cause. Unfortunately for the template, some of them survived and bitterly told their stories. And remember that several — perhaps most — of the 9/11 terrorists were not told that day would be their last.

My Iranian friends delight in these operations, which they see as a double delight: some of our guys get killed, mayhem is visited upon our allies in Iraq or Afghanistan or India, etc., and it’s all done by some stupid Arab (the mullahs have a dim view of Arabs). You may have noticed that there haven’t been many Iranian martyrs in Iraq. Yes, there have been martyr recruitment campaigns around Iran, and tens of thousands have signed up, but the “volunteers” are unlikely to have volunteered, and so far as I know they haven’t shown up to challenge the surge. Accounts of Iranian martyrs in the war against us are just not there. Debka claims that “contingents of Revolutionary Guards Corps of suicide fighters” have been deployed to southern Iraq. I don’t believe it (I rarely believe Debka). The IRGC forces kill others, not themselves. The British press was almost certainly more accurate when they reported that Iranian helicopters had carried terrorists into southern Iraq. No surprise there.

Which takes me back to the British terrorists. You may recall that the last time around (some date with a “7” in it, wasn’t it?), there were explosives that failed to detonate, terrorists who hightailed it away from their mission, and cars were found with explosives in them. Just like now. It’s not rare; it’s quite common. If you ask our military guys in Iraq how this compares with their experience, they’ll tell you that plenty of IEDs fail to go off, and that suicide belts often misfunction. Sometimes the martyr-to-be has (second? first?) thoughts and runs off.

The theory that “it couldn’t have been al Qaeda and Iran because they’re too smart for this sort of buffoonery” doesn’t stand up. Al Qaeda is not the SAS, their fighters wouldn’t pass the physical, and they’d probably be rejected on the grounds that they’re not very good at thinking clearly under pressure and can’t adapt to changing circumstances. And as for Iran, there seems to be a shortage of high I.Q. atop the mullahcracy, doesn’t there? Only a totally incompetent leadership could have so thoroughly wrecked the country. Gasoline shortages in a country with all that petroleum? Breathtaking stupidity. The suicide terrorists’ competitive advantages to date have been basically two: there’s lots of them, so even if many of them fail, a few succeed and kill lots of people. Second, they’ve got a great theme song, and their brand has sold well.

There are other reasons for their ongoing failures, of which the most important is undoubtedly their declining success in Iraq. Lots of believers raced to join the jihad when it looked like the winning horse, but no one this side of Big John Murtha believes they’re on top in either Iraq or Afghanistan. They announced a big Spring offensive in Afghanistan, and instead they’ve lost hundreds of men. Their ranks have been decimated in Iraq, and they’ve lost Anbar Province, which deprives them of a comfortable environment in the Euphrates Valley, through which they have long infiltrated their killers from Syrian bases. And they’ve lost a lot of their top personnel. Some have been killed or captured, others — including Revolutionary Guards officers — have defected. Their main man in Iraq, Moqtada al Sadr, just denounced Iran — his source of money and prestige — for supporting al Qaeda. Most likely they fired him and he’s trying to remake himself as a thoughtful patriot instead of a foreign-supported crazy man, but his Mahdi army is not the menace it used to be, and one will get you eight that lots of his guys aren’t reupping.

In short, clear-eyed young men, even those obsessed with the dream of killing an infidel and burdened with the I.Q. of a blonde heiress, are not as enthusiastic as they once were to sign up for the big slaughter in Iraq.

On the other side, we’re learning, and we’re slowly improving. That’s our M.O., by the way; it’s what we did in the First and Second World Wars. The happy result is that it’s getting harder and harder to be a terrorist. Not that we’re perfect, by any means. It seems that the guy who drove the silver Mercedes in front of that night spot in London was in jail not so long ago, suspected of being a member of the group that planned to set off similar bombs in London, New York, Newark, and Washington. They let him go, but fortunately he failed — just how, we don’t yet know — and ran away.

Again, nothing new. It shouldn’t surprise us.

That said, they don’t have to be great, they only have to be lucky from time to time, and they are tenacious. For all their blunders, they seem to have planned a sequence of terror attacks in London and Scotland, and are undoubtedly planning others there and elsewhere. It’s highly unlikely they will always fail (nobody’s perfect, after all). But smart people don’t sign up for suicide missions. It takes a fool.

AQ has always had multiple tiers of operatives in their attacks. Look at the first WTC attack, Ramzi Yousef jetted in, planned the attack, built the bomb then jetted out leaving the NYC/NJ local cell member to scramble after the bombing. That's why the FBI snagged the two at the rental place trying to get their deposit back on the Ryder truck, they need the money to flee.

I wonder if the lastest clowns,I mean Muslim fundis, still get to go to heaven and screw "virgins" even though their attacks failed and all they accomplished was burning up their vehicles and themselves.

LONDON, Tuesday, July 3 — British police officials investigating the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow focused Monday on suspects in the medical profession, including a doctor from Jordan, another from Iraq, and medical workers or students. As many as five of the seven people arrested so far in Britain appear to have such links.

Skip to next paragraph Timeline: Car Bomb Plots

RelatedA Surgeon’s Trajectory Takes an Unlikely Swerve (July 3, 2007) Security Is Tightened Across London and at All British Airports (July 3, 2007) The inquiry also spread to Australia, where the Australian attorney general, Philip Ruddock, said Tuesday that the police in Brisbane had arrested a foreign resident of the country who had been employed there at a hospital.

The seeming connection to medical personnel troubled many Britons used to seeing the profession as a bastion of trustworthiness and benevolence. Many of the staff at the state-run National Health Service hospitals are foreigners. For the public, moreover, the number of health professionals under arrest offered a baffling departure from images of home-grown Islamic terrorists, many with family roots in Pakistan, implicated in previous conspiracies.

The police now are investigating whether the same people were behind the attack in Glasgow and the attempted attack in London, a senior Western official said Monday. They had already described the events as linked in the way they were planned and carried out.

Three people were arrested Monday, including the hospital worker in Australia and two other people at a residential facility attached to the Royal Alexandra Hospital close to Glasgow that has become central to the investigation.

British news reports, relatives and a person close to the investigation identified two of the detained medical doctors as Mohammed Asha, from Jordan, and Bilal Abdullah, from Iraq. A 26-year-old man arrested in Liverpool over the weekend may also have been either a medical student or a doctor, a person close to the investigation said.

Dr. Asha, 26, was arrested late Saturday when police officers in unmarked cars boxed in his car on the M6 highway in northwestern England and forced it to a halt. He was accompanied by his wife, who was also arrested. Contrary to earlier reports identifying him as an Iranian Kurd, Dr. Asha was said by a Jordanian official to be a Jordanian of Palestinian descent.

Dr. Abdullah was seen in amateur recordings as being arrested and led away by the police after two men tried to ram a Jeep Cherokee into the entrance of Glasgow’s airport on Saturday afternoon. British medical records said he qualified in Baghdad in 2004 and had been licensed to practice in British hospitals as a doctor under supervision since August 2006.

The inquiry spread to Australia because the suspect there had been a roommate of one of the detainees in Britain, an Australian official who spoke on condition of anonymity said. Mr. Ruddock, speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, declined to identify the nationality of the 27-year-old man they arrested, but said he had been seized at the request of the British authorities. The suspect had not been on a watch-list, officials who spoke at the news conference said.

The man was arrested at the international airport at Brisbane as he tried to board a flight late Monday with a one-way ticket, Mr. Ruddock said. He was working at the Gold Coast Hospital in Queensland, Mr. Ruddock added.

There were strong indications on Monday that the Scottish police had been on the trail of two of the attackers on Saturday before they rammed the Jeep Cherokee into the entrance doors of Glasgow airport, setting the car alight. Investigators had used both cellphone and highly sophisticated closed circuit television technology on Britain’s highways to trace the men, according to several accounts, including one by a Western law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Law enforcement officials in the United States and Britain said Monday that intelligence agencies investigating the failed attacks had so far discovered no direct link to personnel of Al Qaeda or training camps.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Sunday that “the nature of the threat that we are dealing with is Al Qaeda and people who are related to Al Qaeda.”

But a British security official who spoke on condition of anonymity under government rules said that Mr. Brown, in office for only days, was probably “describing the ideology” of Islamic fundamentalism and that it was “far too early” to speak of a direct link to Qaeda personnel.

A senior Western law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was “no indication of any outside direction” and “no connection with the United States whatsoever.

“Nothing from phone contacts, nor any other way,” he added. “There has never been any connection of any kind in the U.S.”=====

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The conspiracy to detonate cars laden with gasoline and gas canisters seemed markedly different in its tactics from some recent terrorism plots in Britain — notably the July 7, 2005, suicide bombing attacks on London’s transportation system — drawing on disaffected young British Muslims, often of Pakistani descent, using homemade explosives.

A British security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the latest attackers may have been forced to rely on a crude and ultimately ineffective cocktail of gas canisters and gasoline because of government and police efforts to curb sales of potentially explosive substances like fertilizer and hydrogen peroxide.

The attack in Glasgow followed the discovery of two cars laden with gasoline, gas canisters and nails in London on Friday.

A senior Western law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said British investigators had been greatly helped by closed circuit television cameras on Britain’s highways that pick up details of every license plate.

As soon as the police had noted the license plate numbers from the cars in central London and from the Jeep that crashed in Glasgow, computers quickly traced the cars’ movements over the past several days.

(MD: This is an extraordinary level of surveilance of which the UK govt is now capable. Apparently it worked to the good here, but deeply troubling implications remain.)

In addition, evidence emerged on Monday that call records of a cellphone found in one of the abandoned Mercedes sedans in London had led investigators to a house near Glasgow used by at least one of the suspected airport attackers. The discovery was made before the attack.

Daniel Gardiner, who owns the rental agency that leased the house, said the police had contacted his agency early Saturday to ask about the London car bombs. The attack on Glasgow airport took place at around 3:15 p.m. on Saturday afternoon.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Gardiner said the police had contacted a colleague because his agency’s phone number had appeared on a cellphone found inside one car.

Mr. Gardiner said he was not much help because he was unable to recall when or why his agency had called the number. And he said his office had no record of such a call.

After the airport attack, Mr. Gardiner said, the police contacted him again, asking if he had done business with any of the people in custody. Mr. Gardiner said he confirmed having rented a house at 6 Neuk Crescent in the village of Houston to one suspect in the airport attack.

The leasing agent refused to identify his former client.

The link to hospitals and the medical profession has taken several unexplained twists.

On Monday afternoon, bomb disposal crews detonated at least one car they suspected might be carrying explosives at a doctor’s dormitory outside the Royal Alexandra Hospital, in Paisley, a suburb of Glasgow. One of the men who attacked Glasgow Airport on Saturday is being treated for severe burns at the same hospital.

Although the involvement of foreign medical professionals seemed to be a departure from what is publicly known about the terrorist threat facing Britain, a British security official said law enforcement agencies had in fact monitored other cases involving threats drawing together people of several nationalities.

In Scotland, the Strathclyde police said the arrests Monday of the two men, ages 25 and 28, that occurred in the residential hostel at the Royal Alexandra Hospital followed a night of “intensive police operations.”

British officials said investigators were assessing whether they had rounded up the cell involved in the attack and attempted attack, while one Western official said the British authorities were “pretty confident” that they had rounded up the people behind the plot.

NEWCASTLE-UNDER-LYME, England, July 2 — Mohammed Asha, the Jordanian-trained doctor who has been arrested, though not charged, in the terrorism plots in the Britain last week, was proud of his career accomplishments but fretful about his welcome in English society, friends and acquaintances in Jordan and Britain said Monday.

Medical Workers Emerge as Focus in British Inquiry (July 3, 2007) In this town in the English Midlands where Dr. Asha settled, Simon Plant, 34, recalled in an interview that when Dr. Asha and his wife were interested in renting a modest red brick three-bedroom house last year on a cul-de-sac named Sunningdale Grove, Dr. Asha had a pressing question on his mind. “He seemed very concerned about racism in the area,” Mr. Plant said.

Mr. Plant said that it soon became apparent to him that Dr. Asha’s wife, who was arrested with him on the nearby M6 highway late on Saturday, had experienced racism in the community where the family had lived in Shrewsbury in Shropshire. “It was weighing on him,” he said.

Mr. Plant remembered telling the doctor that race was not an issue in his community, where Dr. Asha, his wife and young son moved in August of last year, renting the Plant home for about $1,000 per month.

He said that the Ashas were model tenants, but that Dr. Asha, a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship, had something of a condescending manner. “He got a slight attitude,” said Mr. Plant, an elevator engineer. “He had a sense of self-importance about being a doctor. You could definitely feel it.”

It was widely reported Monday that a second doctor was also arrested in the case.

Dr. Asha, 26, whose specialty is neurosurgery, recently started work at the North Staffordshire Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent. According to the General Medical Council in Britain, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha completed his medical studies in Jordan in 2004. His limited registration allowed him to work for the National Health Service under supervision. Until last July, he worked as a doctor at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital, both in Telford.

Neighbors said the family was insular, but in the last few weeks two men who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent had started staying with the Ashas at the house.

Chris Shaw, a postal worker who delivered mail to the Asha family, said he was struck that over the last three months or so, Dr. Asha started receiving more packages and certified mail than usual.

“He would just sign for it and go back inside the house without saying much,” Mr. Shaw recalled. He added that Dr. Asha seemed bright, educated, courteous and European in his style of dress.

Not far from the Sunningdale Grove house on Monday, law enforcement authorities were searching a second home in Newcastle under-Lyme on Priam Close. Authorities initially searched the residence on Saturday night.

Mr. Plant said Dr. Asha often dressed in traditional Muslim attire, as did his wife, who would retreat upstairs whenever Mr. Plant came to tend to a maintenance problem.

Others recalled that Dr. Asha alternated between wearing Muslim garb and Western clothing, like white dress shirts and suit pants.

Dr. Asha and his wife, who wore a hijab to cover her head, stood out in a closely knit community that does not have much of a Muslim population.

As for the home where the family lived for nearly a year — where medical books were scattered about — authorities were stripping the inside paneling and tearing up the drains as part of their investigation. No evidence has emerged publicly against Dr. Asha and no details have been released as to what his role in any plot was presumed to be. A person close to the investigation said Mrs. Asha seemed peripheral to any plot.

In the Middle East, his life seemed set for a different trajectory. “He was brilliant, a genius,” said Dr. Azmi Mufazhal, who taught him immunology during his third year, and who got to know him over three years as assistant dean of the Jordan University Medical School. “He would know his subject so well that his questioning often sounded like an interrogation.”

He was so focused on his work that Dr. Mahafzal said he once encouraged his student to drop the books and go out and have fun.

Dr. Asha was born in Saudi Arabia. In 1991, his family moved to Amman, Jordan, where his father said he thought his children had a chance at a better education. In Amman, they lived in a squalid neighborhood where Islamists own the streets.

Mohammed Asha was interested in science from a young age and was an aggressive competitor. Teachers and friends said that in school, Dr. Asha would stop at nothing to get to the top.

He married Marwa Younis after medical school at 23, and they moved to England where he studied on a British government fellowship.

In an interview on Monday at his home in Amman, Jamil Asha, 55, Dr. Asha’s father, dismissed as preposterous the idea that his son could be a terrorist. He insisted that his son had been accused of exactly the opposite of what he had aspired to: saving lives and helping people. “He couldn’t be further from any of this,” Mr. Asha said.

Mr. Asha said he talked to his son almost weekly and last spoke to him on Thursday when he called his parents to discuss a planned trip home. He sounded happy, his father said.

Mohammed Asha, they said, was religious but not extremist. Unlike many other medical students at the school, he had no political affiliation and rarely took part in political rallies on campus, Dr. Mufazhal said. Instead, he eschewed politics for his studies and family life.

But he also had something of a temper, and rarely took criticism well, a trait that some teachers worried would get him into trouble some day. He was articulate and frank, some said, but thin-skinned.

None of that, however, would make him a militant, they insisted. “He’s not the kind of guy who would risk his future like that,” Dr. Mufazhal said. “He had one ambition, which was to be a distinguished physician.”

I wonder if the lastest clowns,I mean Muslim fundis, still get to go to heaven and screw "virgins" even though their attacks failed and all they accomplished was burning up their vehicles and themselves.

Nope, no martyrdom, no 72 virgins. Allah doesn't reward paradise for effort, only results. This places a great deal of pressure on the western jihadis pre-attack preperations.